Critical minerals
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Mining can become Africa’s most powerful engine of regional integration
Opinion: Africa's critical mineral wealth presents a generational opportunity. Additive mining will be a key approach to ensure the sector's potential for development impact is realized.
Does the development world need to worry about critical minerals?
As demand for lithium, cobalt, and copper surges, mineral-rich countries are rewriting the rules on who controls the resources driving the clean energy transition. So, what are they?
Inside Africa’s high-stakes push for mineral sovereignty
As African nations move to ban raw mineral exports, the success of their industrial ambitions hinges on regional coordination and massive energy investments.
A just energy transition requires fair mineral deals for producing nations
Opinion: To achieve net zero, partnerships between critical mineral-producing nations and importers must move beyond pit-to-port extraction and deliver jobs, infrastructure, and clean energy domestically for resource-rich countries.
New EU mineral strategy swaps green goals for military readiness
A new Brussels proposal on critical minerals drops the "green transition" pretense in favor of hard security. But experts warn it fails to offer the global south what it actually wants: value addition and high standards.
Critical minerals, AI, and nature: Where the Soros fund is investing next
Lily Han, head of policy and innovative finance at the Soros Economic Development Fund, discusses the organization's priorities.
Governments adopt UNEA-7 resolution on critical minerals and metals
The measure sets the stage for countries to adopt more environmentally sound means of managing minerals and metals such as lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel amid rising demand.
Special edition: Ministers arrive, money stalls, and minerals teeter at COP30
As ministers land in Belém, finance fights, fragile mineral language, and rising Indigenous pressure set the stage for a tense second week at COP30.
As COP30 debates just energy transition, Brazil’s lithium towns suffer
In Poço Dantas, a Canadian mining company’s lithium project has transformed daily life — just as COP30 debates how to make the energy transition “just.”
The critical mineral that puts food on the table for half the world
Opinion: Potash is a fertilizer that plays a strategic role in global food security, and its importance is increasingly being recognized.
How to turn the critical minerals boom into a development win
As the race for critical minerals accelerates, experts warn that without equity and governance safeguards, a potential development windfall could deepen global inequalities.
Opinion: Why critical minerals need global regulation
As countries aim to decarbonize, critical minerals present new risks of local exploitation and global instability. International regulations are needed to protect communities and economies.
Opinion: On deep-sea mining, climate change, and the guidelines needed to ensure ocean sustainability
Faced with the loss of land and inadequate resources to build climate resilience, will small island nations have no choice but to proceed with seabed mining? Anote Tong, former president of Kiribati, weighs in on the debate.